“You don’t include Plato, it seems you don’t favor Plato/Socrates, why is that?

—“You don’t include Plato, it seems you don’t favor Plato/Socrates, why is that? Thoughts on Madison?”—Tim Abbott

The only value of Plato is that he was so profoundly wrong that his student Aristotle totally invalidated Plato’s work in frustrated response.

Socrates = Skepticism, Plato = Literary Fantasy, Aristotle = physical reality, and Abrahamists = Supernatural authoritarianism.

This is sort of how I feel about Hoppe, Popper, and Mises.

They were very wrong. But very wrong in a way that led me to what was right.

I don’t put a lot of stock in much of any one thinker so much as a set of them, and in particular the whole lot of the founders as a group. It was the group that made the great leap, not any individual.

STUDY? History of warfare, History of the common law, history of the english civil war, the magna carta, the declaration, the articles of confederation, the federalist papers, the constitution, the bill of rights, and the evidence of the difficulty of the court, … well, that’s what we need.